Berlin: The West Antarctic ice sheet may be stabilised by generating additional snow through pumping ocean water onto the glaciers and distributing it with canons, scientists say.
This would mean unprecedented engineering efforts and a substantial environmental hazard in one of the world's last pristine regions -- to prevent long-term sea level rise for some of the world's most densely populated areas along coastlines from the US to China.
"The fundamental trade-off is whether we as humanity want to sacrifice Antarctica to save the currently inhabited coastal regions and the cultural heritage that we have built and are building on our shores," said Anders Levermann, a physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany.
"It is about global metropolises, from New York to Shanghai, which in the long term will be below sea level if nothing is done," Levermann said.
"The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the tipping elements in our climate system. Ice loss is accelerating and might not stop until the West Antarctic ice sheet is practically gone," he said
Warm ocean currents have reached the Amundsen Sea Sector of West Antarctica -- a region comprising several glaciers that are prone to instability due to their topographic configuration, researchers said.
Underwater melting of these glaciers triggered their speed-up and retreat, they said.
This is already now responsible for the largest ice loss from the continent and provides an accelerating contribution to global sea level rise.
The researchers employ computer simulations to project the dynamic ice loss into the future.
They confirm earlier studies suggesting that even strong reduction of greenhouse gas emissions may not prevent the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. "So we investigated what could stop a potential collapse in our simulations and increased the snowfall in the destabilised region far beyond observations,"
said Johannes Feldmann from PIK, co-author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.